Emmeline Pankhurst

Emmeline Pankhurst (15 July 1858-14 June 1928) was a British suffragette leader and Conservative Party politician.

Biography
Emmeline Pankhurst was born in Manchester, England in 1858, and she joined the Independent Labor Party in 1893. Frustrated by the organization's failure to promote the issue of women's suffrage, she and her daughter Christabel Pankhurst founded the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903. As leading suffragettes, they put pressure on the Liberal Party government to grant votes for women. For her militant tactics she was frequently imprisoned, most famously in 1913, when she was sentenced to three years for arson. Released after a year (in August 1914), she abandoned the suffrage campaign to encourage women to assist the war effort by joining the police and services, or by going into industry. She lived in Canada after the war, where she was involved in child welfare and the National Council for Combating Venereal Disease. She returned to England in 1926 and but for her death would have stood as the Conservative Party candidate for Whitechapel in 1929.